Indoor cardio training... OF THE FUTURE

I decided to incorporate some recumbent biking into one of my recent workouts to mix things up, and was amazed at the setup I used. Made by the company "Expresso", the bike was a combination of a video game and an exercise machine. Here's a link to a small writup on the bike (found through yahoo) - FSU Fitness & Wellness: Expresso Cardio
The first video link appears to be broken, but the second gives a decent look(real short).

Simply put, your pedal through several different levels, each with a suprisingly good looking backround... great job on making it look realistic. You can see what's coming up in front of you, for example, a hill. And when you charge it, the difficulty increases depending on the slope, bringing "hill training" on a recumbent bike to a much more enjoyable level. Instead of watching those red dots climb, you can actually focus on the crest of the hill and charge it, shifting accordingly. Although there isn't a huge demand at all on steering the bike, the handle bars rotate so you truely "follow" the track. All the meantime, there are other computer-AI riders biking with you, allowing you to "join the pack" to hold a certain pace(or focus on pushing ahead). Or say you want to challenge your previous best on the chosen track - you design a 1v1 race against previous time via a ghost-rider alongside you.

I was absolutely impressed at how fluid every aspect of it came together, and it truely made for a fun experience. There were over a dozen courses to choose from, each vastly different from each other in terms of both difficulty and scenery. Each track had "high scores" as well, just like a video game, from users who created ID's on the system. Fun to set a ghost-rider at their time, and try to beat it. A whole lot more interesting than staring at numbers, that's for sure.